The photographer holds up a finger from underneath the camera’s black tenting. His thin legs are indistinguishable from the thin legs of the tripod; from time to time, they are mistaken for the spindly wooden legs of an inanimate object—a piano, for example. They are bruised because recently someone distractedly and repeatedly swung a foot under a table, mistaking his legs for the legs of a chair.
“There,” he says to his subject. “Stay. Right. There.” His subject has yet to stay right anywhere.
The photographer prides himself on his talent for fading into the background, for blending into a room until he disappears altogether, until he becomes a small flake of paint in the wall, a splinter of wood in the floor, a dust mote in the air. For this talent he is willing to suffer.
Until quite recently, the photographer had worked at the grand photography annex of the great doctor’s hospital in Paris. The annex had an impressive thoroughness: the glass-walled studio, the dark and light laboratories, the wealth of equipment–platforms, beds, screens, backdrops in all colors, headrests for all those patients who could not sit still, the headrests that served as vices, allowing for a close-up of ears, eyes, nose. There were even gallows from which to suspend patients unable to walk or those patients who couldn’t be trusted to hold themselves upright. At the end of the day, the gallows folded up tidily along the wall of the studio.
This room, however, is simple: a wooden chair, his camera perched on its tripod, and a small window through which comes a salty breeze off the river. There is the far smell of wildflowers and the nearer smell of poultices.
“Your room and yours alone,” said the doctor who hired him away and brought him to Bordeaux. “You may pursue your art in peace.” And though the photographer understood he was being flattered—your art spoken in a sacred whisper—the doctor’s words worked on him as flattery always does.The photographer had grown tired of taking pictures of the great doctor’s anguished women; tired of the great doctor’s tyranny and his insistence that the photographs fit his theory that this woman is prone to fits and this one too and this one too. In Paris, the photographer spent hours fading into the background in order to create portraits of the great doctor’s hysterics, portraits upon which were written an illness–the illness–to be read.
Before the photographer became a photographer, he went to medical school. He was on his way to becoming a man of science, though contrary to what his wife believes, he did not take up photography because of his mediocre grades in anatomy or because he could not stomach the sight of blood. He believes there is something else to taking pictures beyond recording the facts, and when the doctor from Bordeaux approached him in Paris that day and proposed that he come work for him, that he devote himself to taking pictures of this man wobbling in the chair in front of him now, the photographer eagerly agreed. His task: to create a daily photographic record of the patient. It seemed easy enough when the doctor explained it.
Photography requires patience, certainly. The wet collodion plates take time to prepare. Only after the photographer has situated the plate; only after he has framed the shot; only after he has looked again; only after he has focused and focused once more; only after he has checked the distance of the camera to the subject once, twice, three times; only after he has adjusted the light in the room and then adjusted it again; only then does he squeeze the bulb on his stereoscopic camera. Even then, there is more waiting. The pictures seem to arrive years later, like a star’s light, and like a star’s light, the photographs are often dark around the edges. Only then is there the photograph itself.
But today, the first, there have been further obstacles. “Les petits pharmiciens,” the wobbly man mutters. “Where are the ancient cures?” First, his head begins to bob against his chest (a bruise has started to bloom there), and then he falls asleep and slides out of his chair. It has been like this all morning. This man will not hold still; even when he is still, he is in motion, which, it must be said, is fitting for a man who allegedly walked in a semi-trance throughout most of Europe.
“I am so sorry,” the wobbly man says again as the photographer lifts him up by his armpits.
Everything about this man conspires to fall out of the chair. His extraordinarily large head balances on his wiry, pipe-cleaner neck sticking out from between thin, slumped shoulders. When the man is, finally, still, his slumped shoulders continue to roll forward, knobby waves. His hands hang, like weights, and the knobby waves roll after them, threatening to crash to the ground. The corners of his swollen mouth turn down (he was, apparently, stung by bees when he woke from a walking trance to discover himself on a hillside in Pau, up to his elbow in a hive); his moustache droops. The swelling from the bee stings contributes to the exaggerated furrowing of the man’s brow; it casts a shadow on his face. It has made the man’s extraordinarily large head larger, more wobbly. The skinny photographer, being a proportionately skinny person, imagines the bulk to be horrifyingly unwieldy and unmanageable.
Despite these setbacks, the photographer is newly inspired. Last night, he attended a demonstration by a scientist famous mostly for his experiments on the facial muscles of rabbits. Last night, though, it was a woman who was led out into the amphitheater. At first the photographer thought, Oh no, here we go again. He was about to leave when the scientist brought out a volta-faradic apparatus and began to charge the skin of the woman with electricity. “A veritable living anatomy,” he said, and with that he proceeded to isolate the muscles in the woman’s face. Here, the muscle for bliss; here, the muscle for fear; here, the muscle for sadness. “The woman’s spirit, enacted in her anatomy,” the scientist said. It was thrilling. The photographer went home, electrified himself. “This is what photography is meant to do too,” he told his wife when he got home. “Capture the spirit.”
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“Is that right?” she said, half awake. In his excitement, he had shaken her awake. “I was hoping it would earn you some money too.” Still, it was she who had told him that the painter Le Brun spoke of the expressions of the passions in the face and body of a man as the classic problem in painting. The movement of the soul on the body.
“A photograph should be no less than the portrait of a soul,” he said to his wife.
“Yes,” his wife said, and she stroked his cheek in the way she knew he loved. “Now rest so that you might capture that soul tomorrow.” She returned immediately to her gentle snoring.
Today, in this small room, the photographer is after no less than certification, evidence, of this man’s soul.
“Oh dear,” the wobbly man says, sliding out of the chair again. This time, he takes the white curtain serving as a backdrop with him, grabbing it on his way down. It covers him so that he is a wobbly heap on the floor.
“Fascinating!” the wobbly man says when the photographer has righted him and replaced the curtain. He says this, not with fascination, but with surprise, as if he were surprised to find himself there. He looks surprised to find himself anywhere at all.
“Magnificent!” the man says, as if he were at the Impressionist Exhibit in Paris and falling out of the chair was a Monet. “Yet another escapade!” He smiles a strange smile that aspires to be jaunty, as if, with great effort, he is attempting to resemble himself.
“Yes,” the photographer says. “Yes, magnificent. Fascinating. A real escapade. Now, stay right there.” The photographer holds up a hand with those slim, elegant fingers, palm flat: stop. “Right there. No, the first right there.”
Click: a statue of this wobbly man gazing straight at the camera; one of his large, sad eyes swollen shut. Clunk, clunk, as the photographer changes the heavy glass plates. Click: a statue of the man in profile with his long, strange nose, his jaw swollen as if he has tobacco tucked into his cheek. Clunk, clunk, click: the photographer creates statue after statue. There in the carefully trimmed moustache, in the hunched shoulders, in the swollen pores of the bee-ravaged skin, is lodged the wobbly man’s misery. Clunk, clunk, click: the man’s anguished fatigue caught in the downward slope of his swollen mouth, his sadness trapped in his weathered skin.
Who are you? the photographer wonders. What has happened to make you this way?
“A statue of living pain,” the great doctor in Paris often said during his public demonstrations with his women. He said it that horrible day too, the day the photographer has almost, finally, forgotten, gesturing to the girl on her knees in the sawdust of the amphitheater, making the sign of the cross. The great doctor had always taken a certain pleasure in reminding the photographer to be quiet, which infuriated the photographer, who worked so hard to float there, silently as a cloud. The so-called great doctor would say, for example, “You cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it,” and then clear his throat to indicate that the photographer was making too much noise as he changed the glass plates (how was it possible to make any less noise?); or “I am nothing more than, ahem, a photographer, inscribing what I see”; or “The photograph, cough, cough, is the scientist’s true retina.” But on this particular day, when the so-called great doctor turned his Napoleonic profile in the photographer’s direction, there was a nervous titter from the audience. Many of them had come because of the rumors about the so-called great doctor’s temper, and it was about to be unleashed.
“Did I not hire a photographer?” the so-called great doctor bellowed. “Did I hire an orchestra?” and the photographer, who had been floating, invisible, cloudlike, came crashing to the ground, as did one of the photographic plates. When it shattered, the photographer panicked, becoming tangled in his own long, skinny legs as he tried to hurry out of the amphitheater. He tripped, and when he dropped the second glass plate, the audience roared with laughter, which caused the girl who was the subject of that day’s demonstration to fall to her knees in prayer. “A statue of living pain,” the so-called great doctor said as the photographer fled, continuing on as if the photographer had never existed at all.
The photographer has arranged a projector in such a way that it illuminates the wobbly man for his full-face pose, his right half remaining in relative shadow. He places a mirror on the wall in order to fix the wobbly man’s attention. As soon as the man catches sight of his reflection, it is as if he is a child seeing himself for the first time, startled. He turns his head back and forth, examining the strange image in the mirror.
“Not knowing how I got here,” the man says, but he doesn’t finish the sentence. “He is without a consistent memory,” the doctor had explained. The photographer wonders now: Who is anybody without his past? What must it be like to know only the chair upon which you sit, a chair with which you have an embattled relationship?
But eventually, his reflection serving as an anchor, the wobbly man becomes less wobbly; he stops squirming. To the rhythm of the soft clunk of plate replacing plate, the man begins to gain his balance. He begins to behave as if he were sitting alone, firmly and upright, in this room with no one watching him. The agitated spasms that threw him out of the frame subside, as does the occasional outburst of “Fascinating!” and “Magnificent!” The photographer is a paint chip, a splinter, a puff of air.
“Is that me?” the man asks, gesturing toward one of the plates.
“Yes,” the photographer says. “It is you.”
The man seems pleased and a bit surprised.
“I fear I will walk far, very far,” the man says.
“You are right here,” the photographer says, holding up a plate. “And there,” pointing at the man’s reflection in the mirror. “Hold still. It is not much longer.”
“I will try,” the man says. “But I am in pieces.” The photographer watches him fight the tremor that runs through his body in order to hold it still; watches him as he watches his reflection fight the tremor.
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When the next photograph arrives, its star’s light arriving from years away, the photographer sees, even before the image has taken shape, that it is different from the other photographs. The images that have appeared until now at the center of the darkened edges have revealed a feral child subdued. In this photograph, it is as if someone has turned the crank at the back of the man’s wobbly head one more notch and, there it is, a different kind of smile. Not the smile of recognition–there I am in the mirror–so much as there someone is. Before one could mind manners, there had to be a lesson in what manners were. Here, try them on, like clothes. This smile contains certain knowledge. The smile is an offering and a question: Is this him, the man you want?
On his way home, the photographer passes the statue of Diana dragging the fallen stag in the Jardin de la Marie, and the statue to the children of the Gironde who died for their country in the Place de la République. He stops to admire each of them, these monuments that have survived for centuries, which will survive for centuries to come. Through rain and snow, through weeks and months and years, Diana will continue to twist the neck of the stag; the winged woman on the horse will continue to hold the dying soldier across her lap; and the photograph of this wobbly man will continue to be a testament to his psychic pain.
“Why take pictures of these people? Why not let them be?” The photographer’s wife doesn’t look at him as she continues moving around the kitchen, getting dinner ready. They have had this argument before. He likes to argue with her; it helps him think.
“The photograph is as powerful as any medicine,” he says. “It sees things those doctors can’t see.”
“You’ve become awfully important,” his wife says, putting a pot on the table, gesturing to him to sit down and eat.
“But, it was as if there was a crank in the back of his head, turned ever so slightly between plates.” He wants her to understand but he also speaks in order to shake off the cloud. It often takes him a little while to become real again after a day at work, to become, so to speak, more than a person in a picture.
“You discovered something then,” she says. He had. But he is not ready to tell even her. Even he doesn’t quite believe it; if he says it out loud it will disappear.
“Is there something wrong with your cabbage?” his wife asks.
The photographer hates cabbage but he’s kept it to himself for years, so how to explain now? He’ll keep it to himself the way he’ll keep to himself the thing that unexpectedly blossomed on the final photographic plate.
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” he says to her, and he eats his cabbage.
After dinner, while his wife bangs pans in the kitchen, he stands alone in the bedroom. He stands over the bed where he has folded that final plate in several layers of cotton, a delicately cocooned caterpillar, and tucked it carefully under the mattress. He gave all of the plates except for this one to the doctor; this one he will keep. He’s not sure what he’ll do with it but when he looks at it there is a flutter in his chest.
He unwraps the plate from its cotton cocoon to look again. He fears it won’t be there, that he imagined it. But when the last layer of cotton lies on the bed and the plate is revealed, there it is, luminous: a shimmering black cloud above the man’s enormous wobbling head. An aura. There were other explanations for it, certainly–the man never stopped moving, or perhaps it is a smudge. But no, the photographer is sure, the shimmering black cloud is not movement or dirt. It is time’s signature, a force, a vibration that exceeded the body.What strange beauty! The man’s soul: captured? Who knew? Still, there is that flutter in his chest, and the photographer suspects there would be plenty of doctors–even the so-called great one–who would be interested in what the scientist’s true retina has captured and hidden beneath his mattress. For now, he will wrap it back up; he will keep it to himself.
His wife’s laugh startles him.
“You’ve never liked cabbage, have you?” she says, coming up behind him. “Tell me the truth, you never have.” She pushes him and his grasshopper-thin limbs on to the bed, and he watches her unpin her hair, marveling once more at the way the very same things that cause him to grind his teeth–with a different lens, a tighter focus, better lighting–look like love.
The photographer sheds his cloud entirely for this glimpse of love. “I never, ever have,” he says as she lies down beside him.
